Podcast: Improve Your Prose Fast with Don Elliott
hosted by Anne Hawley
Developmental editor Anne Hawley interviews epic fantasy novelist Don Elliott about his strategy for rapidly improving his prose and strengthening his author voice.
After focusing for years on story craft, Don realized his line-level writing hadn’t advanced as much, so he studied authors he admires by analyzing sentence-level choices like length, metaphors, lyricism, and emotion. Don recommends daily 30–60 minute rewrite drills to build muscle memory. Try it for a week and see how much you improve!
What you'll learn
Why story craft skills don't automatically improve your prose — and why line-level writing requires a different approach
How to analyze authors you admire to identify what makes their voice distinctive
A practical rewriting exercise for developing prose muscle memory
How to define your own voice so you can refine it intentionally
Key takeaways
Rewriting the same passage multiple times — with reference to an admired author — is more effective for prose improvement than studying craft concepts alone
Naming an emotion ("rage surged within her") is weaker than conveying it through physical detail and interiority
Stacking metaphors and piling on adjectives can dilute impact; compression often strengthens a passage
The goal isn't to copy another author's voice but to use their work as a mirror that helps clarify your own
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transcript
Anne Hawley: Writers: would you like to hone your voice and level up your prose without going back to school or taking a fancy course? Then this one's for you. Hello and welcome to the Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the happily Ever Author Club.
I'm Anne Hawley, and in today's episode, epic Fantasy novelist, Don Elliott shares with me the simple effective strategy he's discovered for rapidly improving his writing at the line by line level. I think you're gonna love it.
Don Elliot, welcome to the Write Anyway Podcast.
Don Elliott: Howdy. Happy to be here.
Anne Hawley: I especially wanted to talk to you because the other day you mentioned that you have been working hard on, I think you called it, your, your voice, your writer voice or tone, and you set about deciding, after publishing several books that have been very successful, you've decided "I could write better than this."
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: You seem to have found a method for sort of analyzing and reconsidering what has been your natural way of writing your fiction. And I will just say for the audience that your fiction is epic fantasy. It's full of action, it's full of emotion, and you have in the past written with very fulsome descriptions of feeling and descriptions of scene and setting.
And I know that you were talking about, well, I need to hone that or tighten it up in some way. So I'd like to hear you tell us a little bit about what made you think that it was time to tighten that up and what got you started down this path?
Don Elliott: I've always seen writing as any other art form that there's a craft side to it that can be refined and improved over time. And over the years I've been super focused on story structure and character arcs and pacing, emotion, scene structure,
and, you know, readers and myself included, I've seen a lot of improvement in that area. And I've gone from being able to write very simple stories to very complex stories with sweeping casts and multiple POVs and all of that. So I've seen over the years my skills naturally level up there just by studying story craft. And, and, you know, being in things like Pages & Platforms and, and that kind of thing, really studying.
But my prose did not improve as notably in my opinion. So when I go back and I look at my first book, I can see how, you know, my storytelling ability has improved, my scene level has improved, but the prose itself wasn't actually that much better.
And you could argue that pros isn't as important as story structure, maybe for success commercially, but for me, I'm, I'm not so concerned about commercial success as I am just about really enjoying my own work. And I love a well-crafted sentence. I love prose that's very engaging and pulls you in versus, you know, windowpane prose, as some people call it.
Anne Hawley: Wanna just say what windowpane prose means, how you define that term. It's an interesting term.
Don Elliott: Yeah. Brandon Sanderson is the first person I heard talk about it, and he was describing his own writing, which was the idea of you're trying to get the prose out of the way. You're not paying attention to the words, you're just paying attention to what the story is.
So he doesn't use clever metaphors or lyricism, he wants it really stripped out so that you almost don't recognize the prose at all. I can see the argument for that, and some people probably really appreciate that, but I'm attracted to the words themselves as well. And I think a beautiful metaphor or simile can pull you in and elicit something that just saying the thing won't be able to accomplish.
Anne Hawley: You don't notice it, you're just looking through it to the story.
Don Elliott: If mine's gonna be at all windowpane, I want it at least like stained glass, different colors.
Anne Hawley: Okay, so you decided to take this journey of I next layer of self-improvement in your writing is at the prose level. And I know that you mentioned voice, at least I think
Don Elliott: Mm-hmm.
Anne Hawley: where did you go first? What made you think you needed to change it? That your voice on the page wasn't how you wanted to sound?
Don Elliott: I think it started with I don't wanna be voicey per se, but I want a strong voice. I appreciate an author who has a voice to them, you know, a, a unique flair like Ursula K. Le Guin or Patrick Rothfuss, you know, where you could read a passage and be pretty sure you knew who wrote that.
I just really appreciate that and love it. And I'm reading these authors like Patrick Rothfuss and realizing that my prose is just not like his. And when I tried to write like him, as much as I love his writing, it doesn't feel right. It's not my style. It doesn't feel natural, even though I love his writing.
So that made me say I don't know what my voice is, so how am I gonna refine it if I can't define it in the first place? And so I, I set out to do a real deep dive into all these different authors that I really like, most of which were in my genre, and started to analyze, what are they doing on a sentence level? You know, are they mixing long sentences and short sentences? Are they doing metaphors? Are they stacking metaphors? When are they being lyrical and when not? How do they convey emotion? Are they saying things? Are they just showing physicality?
And that started to give me a sense of, I would realize, okay, so Patrick Rothfuss is gonna take a paragraph to do what I might do in a sentence, and it doesn't mean that it's a bunch of fluff. It's not. His writing is still pretty dense in my opinion, and you get a lot of meaning out of that paragraph.
But in realizing he's gonna explain this perspective, and he is gonna explain it in maybe three different angles before he moves on to the next thing. Whereas I wanna explain it from one angle and then move on to the next thing. But how do I explain it? And so one of the things I was realizing with my writing when I feel like my writing's at its best when I'm reading it and I'm really enjoying it, and I feel like it's really just nailing it, I don't actually dive into really exploring emotion. I'm more just say, you know a physical reaction that somebody had, maybe a line of interiority or something along those lines. But when I say something like "she was angry" or, you know, "rage surged within her" that's not my best writing.
Now I think other authors can do it and get away with it, but it doesn't feel right to me for my own voice. So I, I had to figure out,, what is my voice so I can decide what I want to enhance and what I wanna pull back on , to have more of a consistent sound.
Anne Hawley: I notice when I'm reading certain kinds of writing, the author telling me the name of the emotion, doesn't make me feel the emotion. And as a reader, especially of fiction I wanna feel the emotion, not be told the name of it. And it
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: of, you're kind of getting at that. So say a little more about like who you studied and what you got. You said Ursula K. Le Guin, and you said Patrick Rothfuss. Who else did you look at?
Don Elliott: I looked at quite a few, but the ones I ended up really honing in on was Mark Lawrence, Patrick Rothfuss, Ursula K. Le Guin, George Martin and Joe Abercrombie. I did include some Brandon Sanderson and that's because he writes in a similar genre and he's, you know, one of the top selling fantasy authors ever. So it felt like I should at least, you know, look at it. I found there wasn't really much for me to glean from that because he's just trying to do something very different than what I'm trying to do.
Anne Hawley: Okay.
Don Elliott: So the way I went about it is the fourth book I'm gonna publish went all the way through proofreading, line editing, everything, you were involved, went all the way through.
And then I came to this idea of I gotta make better prose. So the way I'm doing it now is I'm taking a paragraph at a time, or a passage I should say, at a time in that book, and I pull the passages aside. I analyze it and see, okay, am I stacking metaphors? I have a tendency to do that. So I have this list of things I have a tendency to do now that I'm looking out for.
So I analyze it for that, and then I rewrite it three or four times. Whether it's better or worse, I'm just rewriting it. And trying to take in the factors that I like about my voice and trying to incorporate those.
And then periodically throughout that, I'll reach over to Mark Lawrence and just read one of his passages because you just have a different vibe and I can see like, do I like that I'm sounding more or less like him?
And why do I sound more like him? What did I do that makes it sound more like him here? I'm not doing it to that extent now, now I'm rewriting the paragraph like once or twice before I move forward with it. But it gave me this really intimate view of my writing in combination with other people and not to compare myself, like who's better or worse, but just stylistically.
Mark Lawrence has a very nihilistic, sarcastic, he's got an edge to his voice that I love. But I don't want to tell the same kind of story, so I'm not trying to mimic that.
Anne Hawley: You can't really separate out what kind of story you're telling from what kind of tone and voice and style that story needs. And there are authors who write over here in this genre we, we. Both know a, a writer who writes Ancient Viking fantasy and then modern 1980s girl stories and, two completely different voices. So they're inseparable, the voice and, and then what it is you're writing and the point of view and the time period and all of that.
By the way, can I just say, it's a very bold move to take a manuscript that's already copy edited and start rewriting it.
That's, that's, that's big
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: you went through this like rewriting taking a paragraph and rewriting it several times until you kind of felt like it was more like what you wanted, and then you started to get the hang of it, I take it. You didn't have to do it three times, just go through it once, and I assume that now you know your next project, some of this will just be incorporated into your heart and you'll just be writing differently. I wonder if you have some before and afters that you could share with us, because I think that would be really instructive.
Don Elliott: Yeah. So this is the first two paragraphs of the book.
" The sea breathed calmly in the morning sun, cerulean waves washing upon the white sands of a distant cove and their slow rhythm as if the thunder's rage from the night before had not ravaged the shores, a drunken lover drowning in anger."
So there's a lot I liked about that, but there's kind of a lot being packed in there. So I, I reduced that entire thing to "The cerulean sea breathed calmly in the morning sun, as if its drunken rage from the night before had never ravaged the ivory shores."
Very, very similar, very close, but this one, I stripped out several adjectives. It's still covering everything that I wanted to cover, but I think it's about half as long as the previous one, and it just feels.
Anne Hawley: You cut out at least one metaphor too, you,
Don Elliott: Yeah. Because I have a tendency of like, and Patrick Rothfuss kind of gets away with it, but it doesn't feel right for me and it doesn't work with the style of pacing that I'm trying to get and things like that.
But then when I look at Brandon Sanderson, you would never get a visual like this from him, so I don't want to go so sparse that you're not getting cerulean waves, you know, comparing the sea to a drunken rage. I love the power of that, but I don't want to use 70 words to convey it.
Anne Hawley: My experience of your style in general, is that you want me as the reader to really enter into the visuals of the world. Your visuals are very strong. Usually you have, I, as I recall, you have use a lot of sound too.
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: you know, crashing waves and that sort of thing, but also that you want me to not just see, but experience the narrator's feeling about the world.
Don Elliott: Mm-hmm.
Anne Hawley: that desire to draw the reader into the richness of the world is still there. I didn't lose anything in your second iteration there, in fact, I gained a little something because I didn't have to track.
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: so many details, but yet that desire to keep that rich, a little on the purple side still, you know, there's
Don Elliott: Mm-hmm.
Anne Hawley: of, you, you open a scene a a lot of times with a very rich description and then we move into the action and it's, it's a gift that you have that I think you haven't done anything to destroy that here. It's still there. It's still happening.
Okay. Let's hear another example.
Don Elliott: " From his mountainside farm, high above, Aeros looked over the ridge to the thick jungle of brilliant emerald trees below, extending for a mile to the distant ivory shoreline in the blue ocean beyond. A cool wind blew steadily, relieving him of the moist heat of the day."
So that's the original. The next one is: "From his mountainside farm, Aeros looked over the emerald jungle that stretched to the sandy beaches below, and a merciful wind blew, offering a respite from the moist heat of the day."
Anne Hawley: Nothing was lost and a lot was gained in that compression. This is really interesting. Now I have a challenge for you. Let's take this second passage about the emerald forest and the beach and all of that, and just say it's Ursula who wrote,
Don Elliott: Yeah.
Anne Hawley: what would she do? Because she has much more spare style.
Don Elliott: Yes.
Anne Hawley: uses very few adjectives, very few adverbs. What would the Ursula voice be of bringing me into this world, just for fun?
Don Elliott: I think first of all, the sentence probably wouldn't be quite as long. She might break it up into two sentences where I'm creating one long sentence in this particular scenario. She probably wouldn't have said "emerald jungle," she would've said jungle, or she might have am what's the word? Am now, I can't say it. Amor size.
Anne Hawley: Anthropomorphized.
Don Elliott: Yeah, like she might've added like a, a human thing that makes the jungle feel a little human versus describing the color. I noticed she does that quite a bit, which I really love and I do try to emulate that sometimes myself as well.
Anne Hawley: So something like the jungle waited or the jungle
Don Elliott: yeah.
Anne Hawley: paused or something that a jungle can't actually do. Sort of pathetic fallacy happening
Don Elliott: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I don't think she'd say to the sandy beaches below, I could drop out Sandy and just say to the beaches below. But this is the opening paragraph of the whole book, and I like the feeling of the sound of it, the sort of sliding into the scene that you're in. So I wanted a little musicality to it, and I felt like " stretched to the sandy beaches below" had some nice alliteration going on but I think she probably would've stripped that.
Anne Hawley: Yeah. Very interesting. Give us a little tip or two for the aspiring writer who would like to undertake something like this, even if they don't write in your genre.
What would you offer if someone came to you and said, I would like to hone my voice?
Don Elliott: What I found from this is when I was learning story structure and you learned that somebody needs to make a choice and the scene needs to change something, you know, a turning point, whatever you want to call it. You learn this concept. And then from that point on, every scene I write, I just make sure that's in there and I learn it once and now I can apply it.
What I find with prose is it's, it's much more like muscle memory. I can get the concept, but when I'm writing, I ignore the concept, or I gloss over it, or I forget it, or, you know, there's 17 different things about my writing that I need to keep in my head, and so I'm not remembering that as I'm writing prose.
And I don't wanna slow down my drafting to be hyper-focused on am I crafting the sentence correctly. So by doing that writing exercise where you write the paragraph or the passage, read an author that you really like or admire, whose voice you want to emulate parts of-- not that you're trying to copy, but you wanna, you know, learn that technique-- and then rewrite the passage and try to be, what if you were that author?
How would Ursula K. Le Guin write this? Another thing that you can do kind of in reverse is take a passage of Ursula K. Le Guin and try to rewrite it in your voice and the way you think you would want it to be. And then rewrite it, and rewrite it and rewrite it. And it's kind of like going to the gym. You're gonna spend half an hour a day just rewriting paragraphs to work that muscle.
Anne Hawley: How many writing sessions would you say you devoted to this exercise, or hours or, or quantify this for the aspiring writer who gets impatient.
Don Elliott: Yeah. I did it every day for half hour to an hour. by the end of the first week, you know, the readers will judge, but to me it just really dramatically improved within one week.
Anne Hawley: I've seen some of it and I agree. I think that it depends on the writer and how much they wanna apply themselves. But that's not like going back to college for an MFA, that's a week or so's worth of half hour, hour writing sessions that are making a tremendous difference in your own thinking about your writing.
Don Elliott: yeah, it's the most dramatic improvement I've seen in my prose in the last six years, and it was like probably within a week. I do this for part of the morning and then I go and I'm drafting my next novel.
My prose is coming out much better right outta the gate, and I'm not having to think about it because I'll recognize. Oh, I'm stacking this metaphor. I already said what needed to be said. I don't need to keep saying it. Just stop, move on.
Or, you know, I've demonstrated an emotion that a character has. I don't need to name it after that. So just stop and move on.
so, again, that muscle memory, I'm thinking better in real time as I'm writing.
Anne Hawley: That's fantastic. Well, Don, tell people where they can find you and your wonderful books.
Don Elliott: Yeah, so donelliott.us, and that's two L's and two T's in Elliott is where my books are. You can find 'em on Amazon. And I'm on all the socials under @donisflying.
Anne Hawley: Well thank you Don, so much. This is gonna be so valuable to our listeners and viewers and to me too 'cause you've given me a lot to think about. So
Don Elliott: Awesome.
Anne Hawley: for your time today. We really appreciate it. And we'll see you again soon.
Don Elliott: Awesome.
Anne Hawley: to your next book.
Don Elliott: Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. This was fun.
You can learn more about Don and his novels at donelliott.us, or follow him on socials @donisflying.
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And that's it for this episode of the Write Anyway Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.